Family Literacy Night- Campfires & Tents!

Family Literacy Night this year was a camping theme.  We had a great turn out and it was a lot of fun!  Our family nights revolve around literacy and math activities, parent information, and a free dinner for our families.  We plan our fall night for the same night at parent/teacher conferences and book fair.  By having all these events in one night, we all get more families to come in to see us.

These are just some of the supplies we used and prepared for our family night.  Lots of books, fluency bags (both reading and math), and smores snacks!

From the moment families step into the gym, they are coming into our Camp Learn A Lot.  This design and our table designs are by Mandy over at Teaching with Simplicity. 

Our materials were set up on these tables.  Families signed in, were given a fluency bag for their child's grade level, a math fluency bag, and a timer if they didn't have one on their phone.  

Our focus at school has been building reading fluency and math fact fluency.  We intentionally set our family night to revolve around these areas so parents could be informed with how well their child was doing in these areas.  This night was more about informing parents rather than just fun activities.  

After the parent and child completed their fluency activities, they came back to our tables and each child was given a free book (dollar sales at Scholastic are a huge help for this) and a bag of Smores.  The bags had miniature marshmallows, chocolate chips, and graham cereal.

These were my fluency bags organized by grade levels and the parent sign in area.

My fluency bags contained directions on colored paper, fluency passage (one for the parent to mark on and another copy for the student to read from), and a sticky note for their words correct per minute score to be written on.  The reading passages came from Reading A-Z.

We do not assess words per minute at this time of the year for kindergarten or first grade, so those grade level baggies contained stories and reading rubrics instead of fluency passages.

After getting a fluency bag from me, students also got a math baggie from Mandy so parents could determine how well their child was doing with recalling math facts.

These are our Fluency Trees!  We divided our trees by grade level bands.

Sticky notes with the students' scores were then placed on the trees.  They looked so pretty and colorful!

We decorated the gym in our camping theme with tents, chairs, and campfires.   Families sat around the campfire to read and work their math problems.  

The students really enjoyed the tents and reading inside them!  It was so much fun to see them inside reading.

Campfire rings in each of our campsites!

These were the table decorations as our families ate their chili and hot dog supper.  Mandy created these!

We even had a photo booth for families to take pictures of each other!  Looks so real with that starry background.

Our superintendent was able to get us some bikes for our drawing!  The kids were beyond excited about winning a bike from the drawing!

We also had a drawing for Walmart gift cards for the parents.  With food, fun activities, and prizes, your family night is almost guaranteed to be a huge success!!

These wonderful ideas for having a camping theme came from Scholastic.  I found their post on using this theme for family night (read about it here) and adapted it to fit our needs.  Thank you Scholastic!

You can read about our other Family Literacy Nights by clicking here and here.